Our son Stellan is now 2.5 months old. Here’s a bit of what’s been notable so far.
Everything becomes new again. Just yesterday we took the subway for the first time with Stellan and it felt as if we were all taking the subway for the first time. I paid much more attention to anything that could put him in danger or would be interesting to show him in the future. Also, we took the stroller so we had to figure out a subway route that had elevators on each side.
It’s easier to generate empathy for anyone now. Of course, I love Stellan and want him to be happy and healthy as he grows older. But this somehow applies to other people if I just think about how they were babies once too. Stellan is so young that it seems like he could imaginably grow up into many different types of people. So when I see a stranger, I can think of them as a future Stellan and it’s much easier to feel a deep empathy for them.
I expect my life to change much more with each month and year. In my mid-20s, the years blended together a bit. There were a lot of fun adventures but I could buy the same clothes every year, work the same job for multiple years, and have the same core set of interests and hobbies. But Stellan is changing so quicky. He’s already outgrown his first set of clothes. And when we are planning the rest of the year, there’s this huge unknown variable of what Stellan will be like in just a few months. This has a profound impact on how I perceive time and change.
It’s gotten easier for me to plan for 20 years into the future. In the past few years, I’ve been trying to run more, eat healthier, and generally stay fit and healthy. I want to be healthy and fit when I’m 52. But it’s hard to stay motivated because this is such an abstract concept. I’ve never been 52 before so it’s hard to imagine what a 52 year old me would have wished that I did to prepare to be 52. But now that Stellan is here, it’s so much easier to imagine him being 20 and then think about how I want to be fit and healthy when he’s 20 so that I can still beat him at basketball or go on a trip with him.
The most common question people ask me when I’m seeing them for the first time since the baby is born is “how are you sleeping?”. I get that it’s a nice, innocuous question, but I find it pretty boring to talk about my sleep habits so much.
Since you asked, my sleep habits haven’t changed. In the past, I’ve been accused of keeping “odd hours” and I thought that being a parent would change things. It hasn’t, so far. I go to sleep around 2am which I’ve been doing for the past 15 years. Sometimes with the baby this means I get a lot less sleep, but this still hasn’t shifted my schedule. We’ll see if this changes…
As a kid, I remember thinking that adults were too restrictive and didn’t trust kids enough. Now, it’s clear to me how that happens. When you have a baby, they are totally incapable and you have to do everything for them. Over time, that changes as they become a kid and gain awareness and capabilities. But it’s hard for parents to figure out how to adjust from a totally incapable baby to a more and more capable child. I still think that most parents are too slow to adjust and it leads to them not giving their kid enough respect and responsibility.
Some of his firsts aren’t too meaningful. Last weekend, I took him to the Museum of Natural History for his first museum visit. But he wouldn’t open his eyes for even one second for the two hours we were at the museum! He likes to sit on his baby seat and stare up at a toy elephant and now he was in the same room as a stuffed woolly mammoth but I couldn’t even get him to open his eyes to see the mammoth. (Although, even if he did open his eyes, there was basically no way he was going to appreciate the mammoth.)
We have much more interesting and positive interactions with strangers. When taking the subway home yesterday, the first car we got in had people yelling at each other and close to a fist fight. We moved to another train and met a nice older lady told us about her granddaughter that’s just a bit older than Stellan. I’m sure she wouldn’t have talked to us if we didn’t have our baby with us. With a baby, we really didn’t want to be on the car where a fight was going to happen but it meant the subway trip also had potential for much more positive interactions.
It’s fun to try and explain stuff to him, even though he doesn’t understand. In his first few weeks, he would often swallow a lot of air while drinking from his bottle. This led to him burping and spitting up and generally feeling uncomfortable. I tried to explain to him how he should try to drink only liquid without gulping down air. But I realized that he probably didn’t know what air is so I tried to explain that and how air is kind of like the physical ether but the ether isn’t real while air is. I don’t think he understood too much from that conversation, but it’s fun to realize how a concept like drinnking from a bottle is stacked on so many other concepts.
I don’t feel pressure to be a good example. I remember my parents did a lot of things that I didn’t think was a good idea. I didn’t end up blindly copying what they did and I don’t imagine Stellan will do that for me. So if I do something that’s a bit silly or self-destructive, like get down on myself after a bad sports performance, I imagine a future Stellan will see that and decide if it’s a behavior that he wants to copy. I get that there will be some copying, but I expect him to learn more by seeing the good and bad in our character rather than always having a good example for a father.